Topic: Starting Your Digital Agency With WordPress
Brennen is the CEO and founder of the North Texas digital marketing agency, PixelCutLabs. At 18 years old, he is a member of the American Marketing Association and an expert on the subject. His marketing agency provides services to local and multinational companies, with clients including The College Football Playoffs, Retreat Central, and MyClouset.com. Brennen is recognized for crafting results-oriented strategies to brand high-profile businesses, helping them stand out among the established competition. With Brennen, you get the best of both worlds, a young man able to keep up with the fast changing times of the digital marketing world, and an experienced professional with the track record and acclaim to take your brand and digital reputation to the next level. Every venture Brennen partakes in serves as a conversation starter, as Brennen makes an effort to disassociate himself with the status quo.
How did you get involved in WordPress?
I got involved in WordPress when my mom, a small business owner, needed a website for her company. Naturally, she brought it up to the 15-year-old me (as she does with anything tech-related, no matter how much it makes me cringe haha) and I was ready to capitalize! Regardless of the fact that I probably made about a dollar an hour, that was the beginning of my relationship with WordPress. I used a pre-built theme, a concoction of (probably super cruddy) plugins, and her new website was and remains online haha. It took me about 3 months to get that online, a time during which I became very familiar with the WP environment, on the frontend at least.
What do you do with WordPress?
Today, I run a marketing agency that has made a website for roughly 30% of its clients. Of those websites, all but one run on WordPress (for technical reasons). This month, we launched a website for the College Football Playoff Foundation (cfp-foundation.org) which, to no surprise, runs on WordPress! It makes development streamlined and content management easily achieved for our clients, especially after we make modifications to the CMS to suit every scenario.
What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?
For me, WordPress has acted as a community builder. I can’t even begin to name all of the people (contractors, business owners, freelancers, coworkers) I have met because of WordPress. It’s an incredible feeling to know that there are always people available to answer my questions, many times for no cost. It’s also wonderful to be able to grow my network at events like WordCamp, which I’ve attended once in the past.
Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?
I want to speak at WordCamp DFW because I am working on building my personal brand and growing my business network.
Why did you decide to speak on starting a digital agency?
I decided to speak on my topic because it’s something I know like the back of my hand (terrible figure of speech, lol). There are so many directions one can take with WordPress, and I’m very happy with the one I’ve followed. I hope that sharing my experience will provide some inspiration for others with similar entrepreneurial spirits and get them started or propel them forward down the path to building a business.
Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!